


Reunion

by Esmethewitch



Category: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy, Star Wars: Phasma - Delilah S. Dawson
Genre: Blood, Character Study, Gen, Hero's Journey, Inspired By Tumblr, Introspection, Moral Dilemmas, POV Finn (Star Wars), Serious Injuries, Talking, Whump, reminiscing over a horrible shared childhood, twisted family feelings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-25
Updated: 2019-06-29
Packaged: 2020-05-19 08:07:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 4,479
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19352929
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Esmethewitch/pseuds/Esmethewitch
Summary: Finn and Hux meet again, at the end of everything.





	1. Homecoming

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Inspired by this tumblr post: [ a post that made me think about Finn & Phasma & Hux ](https://lyledebeast.tumblr.com/post/185823007139/i-would-love-to-be-excited-by-the-prospect-of)by Lyledebeast.

In the smoky bowels of what was once the _Finalizer,_ Finn heard General Hux before he saw him. Back when he was still FN-2817, that was not unusual. One could hear his bootheels clicking and the swish of his greatcoat long before Hux ever deigned to speak. Or, if passing by an office door left ajar, hear his voice rumbling in angry growls punctuated by barks. In those latter cases, the best thing for any stormtrooper to do was keep walking at the regular patrol speed. Sprinting past the doorway or pausing to listen were both dangerous options. Hux had an uncanny sense of hearing. He would know if you were eavesdropping or running away. Snoke once called Hux a “rabid cur”. Finn would have disagreed with him. After all, he worked with the man for longer than that freaky old...thing ever did. No, General Hux was a pale, long-limbed spider, comfortably ensconced at the center of a web that he’d coerced and wheedled others into building for him.

And now that web was destroyed with the wave of a mere stick. Hux sneered at the “scavenger girl trying to defeat the might of the First Order with only a staff of Jakku,” but beat a hasty retreat when Rey gave that beautiful, dangerous grin and pressed the center of her upgraded staff to reveal two blue lightsaber blades. Her fight with Kylo Ren had fractured Anakin’s old kyber crystal, but it had broken into two neat pieces. With some help from Rose Tico, Rey had built a double-bladed lightsaber. It was old, it was new, and it was fully hers. Finn had been unable to do more than gaze in terror and wonder as the red kyber lightsaber sparked before Kylo’s furious face as he swung at Rey, and each time one of her cold blue lightsabers spun up to parry it.

“Go!”, Rey screamed at him, ducking and checking her stance before Kylo could take advantage of this distraction. “We’re destroying the ship! Try to start an evacuation!”

Kylo noticed him, and lunged. “Why didn’t you die last time?”, he roared. Finn scrambled away and fired off a few rounds of his blaster. Kylo stopped the bolts with a wave of his hand, but this action left him vulnerable to a new attack by Rey. Finn left. Yes, he was a distraction for Kylo in the field of battle, but he was also a distraction for Rey. They’d talked about this beforehand. Finn was a potential hostage for either Hux or Kylo Ren to use against Rey. Or Poe. And Rose Tico, for that matter. He would do well to stay out of Ren’s way, and take care not to run into Hux.

So Finn ran through to the bridge of the _Finalizer,_ blaster drawn. He approached a group of officers clustered together. He recognized one of them. Lieutenant Mitaka. He holstered his blaster. This man needed special handling. They’d huddled behind an overturned desk together, once, though he was sure that the lieutenant would not not recognize a face without a helmet. Finn turned to him. “Get everyone you can into the escape pods, and deploy them,” he said. “I don’t think this ship will make it.” The officers gaped at him, the Traitor back to tell the loyal of the First Order to run away.

“B-but what about the Supreme Leader? His orders were to man the bridge…” Mitaka was stammering, and flinched away from him.

“I do not think the Supreme Leader will make it either,” Finn told him.

“So, we jump into the escape pods and let the Resistance shoot us down?” a woman with a tight ponytail and a Chief Petty Officer’s badge asked.

“They won’t shoot you down,” Finn said. “Trust me on this.” He was scared of the Resistance at first, worried that they’d interrogate him in all sorts of painful, low-tech, tetanus-inducing ways when they learned who he used to work for. But they didn’t. The worst he could say for them was that a couple of people were horribly patronizing, telling him things like: “This here is what we in the Resistance call a bed! You sleep in it!”, and it was all he could do to prevent himself from replying: “Thank you so much! We were never allowed to sleep in the First Order, so I look forward to trying this new experience. Is it true that your brain just shuts off for a few hours?” However, people like Sensor Officer Yarik (whether malicious or well-intentioned but thicker than triple-reinforced durasteel, Finn would never know) were not an accurate representation of the Resistance as a whole.

“We have no reason to trust you,” Mitaka said. Just then, the ceiling cracked and a beam crashed through a row of consoles, leaving a trail of sparks in its wake. Mitaka gulped, and pressed the alarm button. He clambered atop a chair. “Escape pods, everyone!”, he yelled. “Fill each one to maximum capacity, push the button, and don’t worry! We don’t want to end up like the poor blighters on Starkiller!” It looked like the bridge crew would evacuate. But who would warn the troopers, or give them a clear path to the pods? Finn ran towards the trooper levels, the smell of charred circuitry prickling his nose.

The metal around him gave a warning creak. Whatever stars-damned Force thing Rey and Kylo were doing was tearing this ship apart far more effectively than Ren’s stupid feelings ever did. He could turn back now. Should turn back, if he didn’t want to chance unstable flooring, engine fires, and structural collapse. But there were people down there. He gave up all pretense of rational thought and let his adrenaline carry him over the gaps in the floor, under the falling beams.

He skidded to a halt in front of what used to be the hallway to the interrogation cells. Rumor had it that besides serving as a place to detain prisoners, this place led to Hux’s secret laboratory. A place where he worked not on schemes for world-ending weapons, but on refining tiny little devices that would kill one person, or a select few, but leave those around them standing and not suspecting a thing. Now, this hallway was a mess of crumpled durasteel and flames. Someone was coughing. A few fallen beams shifted. “Get kriffing up, Ren’s thrown you into worse,” a familiar voice mumbled. A pale hand streaked with blood emerged from the wreckage. Finn drew closer. He could see a flash of red hair, peeking between the gaps in the rubble. He grabbed a couple of beams and shoved them to the side.This wreckage was not heavy, but it appeared that it had fallen from a great height. It would not be too difficult to move these beams, but whoever was trapped beneath them was probably badly injured.

Hux’s battered face appeared. Two green eyes blinked (one nearly swollen shut and purple on the edge), and looked up at Finn. A thin line of blood trickled from the corner of his mouth. But the General recognized him. “Ah, it’s you. Traitor scum. Come to finish the job?”

“What job?”, Finn asked.

“Don’t play dumb,” Hux spat. “You aren’t. So, your Resistance friends managed to destroy my ship even more efficiently than Kylo Ren. I think both my legs are broken, and I’m not too sure about the state of my spine. I cannot move my right arm, much less reach my blaster. Do it. Shoot me.”

Finn looked down at the wreck of a man trapped in a crumbling ship. Here and now, pathetic and broken, Hux was still telling him what to do. Finn would not tolerate this. He took out his blaster, and removed the safety. Hux grinned smugly. “At least I won’t live to see the destruction of the Order, and the fall of the Galaxy into chaos. None of you lot know how to form an efficient system of government…” Finn pushed the safety button once more, and holstered his blaster.

“No.”

“No? You think the Republic could ever be rebuilt into something approaching functional?”

It said something that Hux could rant about politics even while dying. “No, I’m not going to shoot you. You always got what you wanted. Not anymore.”


	2. Old Lessons

Finn pushed the remains of a durasteel door off of Hux’s torso. He wasn’t sure how that got there if the ceiling fell in. At a closer look, it seemed that the entire hallway had imploded, and converged on Hux. He lay limp, stabbed through by a broken spar like a used training dummy. Blood trickled from a wound in his side. Finn was no medic, but this didn't look good. If the falling debris had missed the lungs and only punctured flesh, Hux might have a chance.

But should he have a chance? This man was responsible for the destruction of the Hosnian System and Hays Minor. He refined his father's Stormtrooper program, raising the next generation with even less compunction about killing. His right-hand woman was Phasma; the cruelly nurturing warrior who tried to mold Finn into the image of herself. _Maybe she already did,_ Finn realized with a shudder. She would have killed him. So he killed her instead. He could detect no true rage from the captain when they fought, only a jaded resignation. (Poe once asked how troopers understood their comrade’s emotions through the vocoders and masks. Finn gave him an hour-long lecture on body language and posture complete with demonstrations, but finished it with: “And sometimes you just _know_.")

Captain Phasma’s star pupil finally posed a challenge to herself, which she likely expected. That was all Phasma ever knew; the endless cycle of rising and waning strength, the constant threats from an unforgiving land and her own baleful people. Once, he’d asked her what life was like outside of the Order. In any other cadet, this might have been grounds for reconditioning. But because he was FN-2187, she scanned the room, and when satisfied that they were alone she patted the empty spot on the bench beside her in an unusual moment of tenderness. He followed her lead and sat down. She told him a story of sharp rocks, of beetles that would dissolve human flesh with one bite. Her nights were often sleepless; when not contemplating the possibility of attack, the pinch of an empty stomach kept her awake. On Parnassos, any misstep meant death from infection, violence, hunger, or the jagged stones sticking out of the sea like teeth. “Only the strong survived,” Phasma told him. “The weak were burdens to the rest of us. Parnassos gave us nothing. The First Order has food and bacta, and I am grateful for that.”

Young FN-2187 considered this for a moment. “We have food. We have ships, and bacta too. Why do we worry so much about culling the weak? We don’t have to, do we? I mean,” and here he gulped, realizing he’d gone too far to turn back, “FN-0439 could have gotten prosthetic legs. We have the tech for that.” Pale-skinned, dark-haired little FN-0439 had lost both of her legs in an accident involving a catwalk with no railings and some molten durasteel a couple of years ago. After a brief stay in medbay, she was never seen again. FN-2187 knew why.

“What do you think FN-0439 would have done with new legs?”, Phasma asked, the vocoder hiding any reaction to his boldness. She had not moved an inch since he spoke, betraying no amusement or disapproval.

 _This is another test,_ FN-2187 realized. _Maybe Captain Phasma told me so much because she wants to watch me react._ He looked at his boots, then at Phasma’s shining pair, careful not to betray the motion of his eyes with a tilt of his head. “She would have returned to duty,” Finn said. “Lord Vader was more machine than man, they said, yet he still served the Empire. For most of his life, anyway.”

Phasma sighed. “Do you know how long the batteries for a pair of legs last between charges,on average?”

“No.”

“Two hours. Less time than an arm would last, because they have to support and move the rest of the body. FN-0439 was still growing. She would have had to spend considerable time learning to use a device that she would outgrow. She would not have been able to perform the duties of a stormtrooper. In battle, do you think she would get a break to connect them to a charging port? What would happen if the batteries ran out or failed, and she was left stranded on the battlefield? What might our enemies do to her if she was captured?”

Phasma made several good points here. She never mentioned the possibility of reassigning FN-0439 to datawork or permanent sanitation duty, though. But that was beside the point. Every First Order member had to be ready to fight.

 _Kill him,_ the ghost of Phasma whispered in Finn’s mind as he stood over his bloodied General. _He would have killed you. Your softness has always held you back, FN-2187._ No, this was not his General anymore. He was not FN-2187 anymore. And Phasma was dead. He’d killed her. _As I would have done, _he imagined her saying.__

Hux shifted, scrabbling with his left arm for purchase on the rubble. He winced, and gasped again. “Get on with it,” he hissed at Finn. “I don’t particularly care if you have a bit of fun with me beforehand. Just don’t stand there gawping.”

Finn took off his jacket. Poe’s jacket. He appraised Hux’s battered form, then put his head close to his chest and listened. No rattling or sucking. That was good. Or bad, considering that this was General Hux. “I won’t know about the state of your lungs for sure, since I don’t have a scanner on me,” he told him.

“Why the pfassk do you care about my lungs?” Hux moaned.

 _He’s terrified,_ Finn realized. Unbidden, a series of images flashed through his mind; a bloody knife, a torn uniform, pale skin painted with bruises and blood… His stomach twisted, and in that moment he felt pure terror and heard a voice silently begging: “Get on with it, make it quick…” _That isn’t me. That’s him. Oh kriff, that’s him._ Finn had always been good at reading people, when he put his mind to it. Now, today, he’d gone too far. He gently tugged at the metal spar, and it came free with a sucking pop. Hux whimpered through gritted teeth. _That sounded ominous._ At least the wound was shallower than it looked, though it was bleeding too much. Finn balled up the jacket. Leather wasn’t the most absorbent of materials, but if he remembered his battlefield medicine classes the direct pressure was what mattered most. The blood would ruin the jacket that his first non-First Order friend had given him, but Finn told himself that he’d always worn clothes that other people gave him, and it was time for a change.


	3. No Tidy Ending

Finn covered Hux’s wounds with the jacket and gently pressed down. Hux grimaced at the new touch, and looked away.

“Does it hurt?”, Finn asked.

Hux laughed, the chuckle ending in a blood-spattered cough. “No, I love blunt-force trauma and getting cut up with pieces of my ship. This is my favorite way to pass an afternoon.”

“I meant, does it hurt when I do this? Are there any areas that are worse when others?”

“Of course it hurts. If you’re trying to figure out which parts of me are the worst off, I can’t help you there. Everything fell on me at once.” Hux shifted under his hands, but soon gasped and gave up trying to move. “Why are you still here?”, Hux asked. “I am surely not the only survivor left in this part of the ship.”

Finn was wondering that himself. “You’re injured, and you’re in danger of bleeding out. Besides, you’re..” he trailed off, thinking better of it.

Hux saw this uncertainty. “I’m _what_?” Just like that, Finn was a young trooper again, and Hux was asking why the performance objectives for that week had not been met yet, not considering that his expectations were slightly unrealistic.

Finn sighed. “You’re alone.” _You were always alone,_ he thought but did not say. “The others, they would be in a group. Even if there were injured, they would have someone looking after them. And you shouldn’t...you don’t leave anyone behind.”

Hux frowned. “You did when you left the First Order.” Hux didn’t get it. He hadn’t seen FN-2003 crumple on the red sands of Jakku, his blood marking Finn’s helmet. He never knew anyone who disappeared for reasons beyond his control.

“The First Order wasn’t bleeding out on the ground,” Finn said.

“In a way you made the First Order bleed when you left it,” Hux admonished. “You were the only trooper who could shoot worth a damn. Everybody else misses.”

“Oh kriff, I’m such a mean scummy deserter! I abandoned a lovely charitable organization whose mission was only to improve the Galaxy by destroying a bunch of unnecessary planets and burning some ugly huts down! And the people who lived there were entirely the wrong sort, we were better off without them. What a monster I am!”

The General swallowed. “Says someone just barely too young to remember the Great Famine of 8 ABY.”

Finn vaguely recalled hearing that the destruction of the Death Star and the subsequent collapse of the Empire had triggered an economic decline that hit all of the Galaxy hard, particularly formerly Imperial regions. The Death Star was expensive, and then it was gone. The Rebels, for all of their pluck and daring, were not especially adept at fiscal policy. And planets that had enthusiastically supported the construction of the Death Star were hit with punitive sanctions in an effort to recoup the costs of rebuilding a Republic. “I don’t think that’s a justification for…”

Hux cut him off. “The Arkanis Sector was supposed to pay two billion credits in reparations. There had just been a war. Nobody had it. So, the Treasury Office just issued more credits into circulation. Reparations paid, problem solved. Only now, back on the planets, one loaf of bread was six hundred credits. Everything cost more and more money, and people had less.”

Finn scoffed. “Spare me the ‘dying middle class’ rhetoric,” he said. “I think not blowing up planets or killing people in their own villages should be the first priority, for now.”

Hux fixed him with a steely gaze. “But what about _later_? The Republic didn’t think about that either. And it wasn’t a matter of people not being able to afford going off-world on holiday. My mother used to boil boot leather. Then, she’d use that to thin out a can of beans, if we could get our hands on one. There was a thing called ‘wall candy’ that we would suck on, sometimes. If you stripped the wallpaper from a wall and dissolved off the flour paste, you could boil that into a sort of lozenge. It was glue. But there were carbohydrates in it. And I was one of the lucky ones back then, all things considered. I passed corpses on the street every morning. Those people wasted away into nothing.”

For a moment, Finn saw Hux as he was when he first glimpsed him all those years ago, knobby-limbed, thin, and feral. At the time, he’d attributed the hunger that surrounded him like a dark pit to the cadet’s all-consuming ambitions. It followed that Hux would want to exact revenge on the people whom everyone in his formative years blamed for a million little tragedies.

“So, to prevent such horrible things from happening again, you sunk a bunch of engineering careers and lots of credits into building another Death Star,” Finn mused. “I mean, I get that the Republic did nothing for the Outer Rim. I really do. But making the same mistakes that the Empire did all over again doesn’t seem like a good method.”

Hux spat out another clot of blood. “This time, we were supposed to win. We would bring stability to the Galaxy once again, and create jobs. Nobody would go hungry.”

“But you didn’t win. I think Rey will defeat Kylo Ren. Morale in the First Order is low. People are getting sick of fighting.”

“No, we didn’t win,” Hux admitted. They were silent for a while, the only sounds the faint beeping of emergency alarms and Hux’s labored breathing.

“You didn’t answer my question,” Hux said. “Why haven’t you left me behind? Don’t give me some banthashit about the inherent value of all sentient life or something.”

There was a rumble, and another wall fell. Finn ducked, shoving Hux down and crouching over him. When he dared to look up and the dust cleared, Finn was trapped in this corridor. After catching his breath, he simply pointed at the rubble blocking his way.

“I asked that question before that happened,” Hux said.

“You really want to know?”, Finn asked.

Hux swallowed. “It’s better than not knowing.” Finn thought back to the things he wished he didn’t see from the General, and conceded that he had a point. Finn didn’t really know himself. Part of him wanted to defy Hux and Phasma’s ghost as thoroughly as possible, and if that meant being kind to people he despised, then so be it. But that defiant kindness had another, older source.

“Iusedtofeelsorryforyou,” he blurted.

“I didn’t catch that,” Hux replied.

“I used to feel sorry for you. When we were kids, you know?”

Hux rolled his eyes. “Yes, my father was a figurative bastard who sired a literal bastard and never let me forget it. He’s dead now. That’s all old news.”

“It wasn’t about that,” Finn said. “You were always off by yourself. I thought that was an awful way to be.” Again, in a foggy memory, he saw Hux standing off to the side of the other children shoulders slumping and red hair breaking free of its pomade to hang over his face, berated by his father for some slight offense. Nobody comforted him afterwards, or roundly denounced Commandant Hux as a ‘tosser’ in the way that angry little cadets did when they were speaking privately. “Then, later, I thought you preferred it that way.”

“I did.”

Another painful silence followed. “And I know you want me to shoot you, or let you go down with the ship alone. A nice, clean officer’s death. I won’t let you have that. I think you can pull through this.”

Hux raised his eyebrows. “So they can execute me later?”

“Maybe. I don’t want to make that decision.”

The General snorted. “I thought you left the First Order so you could decide things for yourself.”

“I never had any real practice with it before I left.”

Hux cleared his throat wetly. “I always tried to hate you,” he said. “I couldn’t.”

Finn didn’t know what to say to that. Hux elaborated.

“Every time I messed a sim up, my father would say, ‘stop that, you can do better, FN-2187 did this and scored twenty points higher than you.’ I decided that I’d find this FN-2187 and deal with him myself. If he was anything like that prat Cardinal, I’d start planning his assasination. Then, I met you.” He glared at Finn. “I couldn’t seriously consider it. The mere thought of killing you disturbed me.”

Finn laughed nervously. “That’s called a conscious. Most people don’t feel comfortable planning assassinations.”

“I am not most people. Neither are you.” Hux screwed his face up in pain. “People _like_ you. I’m not sure why. And you bumble on giving everyone the impression that you’re happy to be there, and you want to know everything about them. That makes them trust you, for better or worse.”

Finn reflected on this. Yes, it was true. In his worst moments, he wondered how much of that was due to his personality, and how much was determined by terrifying factors beyond his control.

“So, you used to feel sorry for me,” Hux went on. “Are you going to tell me that there was some good in me all along and that I’m forgiven?”

“No! Of course not.”

Hux smiled. “Thank goodness for that,” he said.

“I think that in order to be forgiven, you have to repent first,” Finn stated.

“There’s as much chance of that as there is of Rose Tico deciding to forgive me,” Hux said. “How is she, by the way?”

This took an awkward turn. Hux probably wanted to bait Finn into striking him, maybe killing him. He wouldn’t rise to it. “ She’s awake. Doctor Kalonia says she should be walking again within the next couple of weeks.”

“Ah.” And that was all.

Hux’s mention of forgiveness had wriggled its way into Finn’s mind and he couldn’t stop thinking about it. “Even if you started serving soup to orphans, helping old ladies cross the street, and begged me for forgiveness, I’m not sure I could give it to you,” he said.

“Oh?”

“I could forgive you for how things were between us when we were young. But that doesn’t account for everybody. I only speak for myself. I don’t represent all stormtroopers. Much less everyone on the Hosnian System or Hays Minor. And I’ll bet that they would all have different things to say to you. Nobody can give you forgiveness because you harmed too many individual people, who all hurt in different ways.”

“Good thing for me I don’t want forgiveness, then.”

“Yes.”

Hux seized up again, wracked by invisible spasms of pain. Finn extended his hand to meet Hux’s good left hand. Hux stared at it as though it were an ant crawling across a formerly pristine countertop for a minute, then took it and squeezed.

“Anyway, I’m here,” Finn said softly.

Hux looked away. “Thank you,” he replied. Together, they waited. Hux’s pulse was faint, but still there. His skin was clammy and cold, yet he did not release his tight grip on Finn’s hand. After five minutes or five hours, Finn wasn’t sure, the rubble behind him shifted not with the motions of a ship falling apart, but with the power of a scared Force-user who was worried about what she would find on the other side of the wall of crushed metal.

“Finn? Can you hear me?!”, Rey called.

“Rey! I’m here!” Finn was elated. Rey was here, and that meant she’d defeated Kylo. He looked down at Hux’s still form. “We’re here,” he corrected. The war was over again. He’d do everything in his power to make sure the reconstruction of the Galaxy went differently this time.


End file.
